Garden Spaces

I'm putting together a new book,
based on the garden strands of this diary. I've got plenty to choose
from:

vegetables

compost heaps

piles of bricks

weeds

. . . and I haven't even started looking through my sketches of
birds, bees and butterflies.

The big advantage of the book over the online version of this diary
is that I can tell a specific story. The format I've chosen is A5
(about 6 x 8 inches), 64 pages, printed in two colours, sepia and
dark sage green probably, on a very slightly tinted paper - a very
pale green, grey or parchment.

I like the way a drawing like this (left), of a pile
of bricks surrounded by weeds, can be given room to breathe
on a spread in a book. It would fill the left-hand page and one
third of the right-hand page, leaving room for a paragraph of hand-written
text.

Drawings don't really get the same room to breathe on a computer
screen - there are usually scroll bars, menus and title bars impinging
on the simplicity of the picture on the page.

Mundane Moments

There are some moments from the diary that I know I'd like to include,
like this one that celebrates the pleasures of a mundane task in
the garden; the time I got around to moving that pile of bricks.

As I worked I kept finding various small creatures in the subsequent
layers of the pile, so I imagined the whole thing like a block of
flats and - because of the different characters of these slugs,
snails and spiders - I found myself imagining the whole thing as
a 1930s or 1940s black and white movie.

Groucho appears as a dancing spider, Peter Lorre as a startled
snail.

Pile of Bricks: the Movie

Lettuce

I can do so much design for print
on screen but at some stage I have to see it on paper. I need to
get the feel of the thing in my hands so I've printed this out on
our old black and white office laser on scrap paper (those grey
bands are the text on the other side of the paper; I like to recycle).

I like the way I can have a sequence of drawings going across a
spread, in this case a row of lettuce seedlings
in the greenhouse. There's so much I could put in this book and
perhaps some pages will be as closely planted with sketches
as our deep beds are with rows of veg.

But I think the real message that
I would like to get across is that in a garden that you can find
yourself stepping into another kind of space. You walk out of your
back door and find yourself drawn into the seasons and cycles of
the natural world. To tell that story I need to give the drawings
and text a space of their own too.

Even though this drawing of a dock weed is in
black and white it reminds me of the air and sunlight on the day
I drew it. I can write about that on the left of the spread but
I would lose the meaning of the page if I boxed it in with other
details.

Dock

Today
in the Garden

We have four goldfinches at the niger seed feeder this
morning. There are only two perches on it - perhaps we should have looked
around for a bigger feeder!

As
the light fades the robin is the last at the bird feeder
and, as it gets a bit darker still, two voles chase each
other on the narrow bed at the edge of the patio. They've no doubt come
to gather the food spilt by the starlings, sparrows and other birds that
have been feeding all day.